CEAS Colloquium Series
From the mid-1950s through the 1960s Japanese film theory increasingly dealt with the question of cinema’s specificity in relation to other forms of image-making media. A concept that played a crucial role here was the “image” (eizô), a term that dominated the debates around image-making practice and designated a special class of images produced and mediated by technological apparatuses. The rise of television played a key role in prompting this engagement with “image theories” (eizôron). Yet, the need to theorize television was not the sole cause of this discursive shift. Rather, the...
How do we explain the unexpected resilience of the Chinese Communist political system? One answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage,” on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, has helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as essentially “Chinese.” Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and...
The Jinshin Rebellion of 672 was an epoch-making event that determined the shape of Yamato politics for the next hundred years. Its victor–the ruler we know as Tenmu–took advantage of his military success to reform the basic structure of court politics and establish an imperial-style state. This talk examines how the Jinshin Rebellion was historicized in its aftermath and in the early eighth century. While the official historiography of the Nihon shoki appears at first sight to be a unanimously positive portrayal of Tenmu’s victory, one can in fact identify distinct narrative strands...
The organizational theory of the multinational firm holds that foreignness is a liability, and specifically that lack of embeddedness in host-country social networks is a source of competitive disadvantage; meanwhile the literature on labor market discrimination suggests that exploiting the bigotry of others can be a source of competitive advantage. We seek to turn the former literature somewhat on its head by building on insights from the latter. Specifically, we argue that multinationals wield a particularly significant competitive weapon: as outsiders, they can identify social schisms in...
As the largest and most vocal minority groups in postwar Japan, the Koreans and the Burakumin have received much scholarly attention, especially in recent years. While enhancing our understanding of the way in which discrimination shapes the experiences of both of these groups, however, most studies of either minority overlook other salient aspects of their experience of discrimination, such as the tendency for similarly disadvantaged groups to end up living in the same communities, and the problems of mutual discrimination between them that often result. This presentation addresses such...
Five decades after the adoption of the (revised) US-Japan Security Treaty, two decades after the end of the Cold War, and amidst the present collapse of US-supported regimes across West Asia/North Africa, East Asia seems stable. But is it? Japan is no Egypt. And yet in East Asia, the relationship between the world’s No 1 and No 2 (till yesterday) powers remains rooted in the war, defeat, and occupation of nearly seven decades ago, reinforced by the structures of Cold War. The “master-servant” quality of the relationship that I wrote about in 2007 (Client State - Japan in the American Embrace...
Western research on Korean nationalism—for example, Shin Gi-wook’s Ethnic Nationalism in Korea (2006) often neglects aspects of Korean cultural nationalism, while accounts of Korean cultural nationalism rarely discuss the salient role of language in Korean nationalism. In recent work (“North and South Korea,” in Language and National Identity in Asia, 2007) Professor King has asserted that discussions of Korean “linguistic nationalism”—both North and South of the 38th parallel—are better recast as “script nationalism.”In this presentation, he will focus on a particular offshoot of Korean...
This presentation examines the ways in which kunqu, an operatic genre of Chinese performance arts, provides objects, sites, and processes for traditional Chinese men to negotiate their masculinities. In particular, this presentation posits that traditional Chinese men manipulate kunqu arias/music to underscore the subjective and oftentimes conflicting components of their manhood.
The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has arguably defined Korean literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In this paper I argue that the literary modernism that rose to prominence in 1930s colonial Korea was neither an escapist aesthetic practice severed from the socio-political context of its production nor a derivative and partial “alternative” to a purportedly original European modernism. Instead, I advance the thesis that Korean modernism, particularly in its linguistic relationship with the “real,” engaged in complex ways with the...
More than six decades after the end of World War II, China is finally coming to terms with the devastating effects of the war against Japan on its society and culture. During the war, ideas of nationhood and citizenship were fundamentally challenged and rethought in the wake of mass population flight, physical destruction, and countless deaths. This talk will use wartime materials from Chinese archives of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government to argue that modern ideas of state and citizenship in China were profoundly shaped by the experience of war, and that the effects of those ideas...
It has been widely hypothesized that modernization breeds political development. Although political scientists have focused on grand theory building, one is left wondering if the speed of economic development or modernization matters, or if it is just a threshold where factors amenable to democracy start to emerge. In countries that achieve rapid economic development and start the democratic transition process in a short time period, the pace of political recruitment (i.e., the quality) may not keep up with economic achievement. Because the quality of political candidates does not keep up...
In the wake of massive protests in Okinawa after three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old girl in 1995, the Pentagon agreed to close a Marine air base located in the middle of a city. But there was a catch. The Japanese government would have to build a replacement in Okinawa. This small island prefecture, comprising 0.6% of the nation’s land area and less than 1% of its population, already bears 75% of the total U.S. military presence in Japan. Some 25,000 U.S. troops and 20,000 of their dependents currently reside on bases that occupy 15% of the prefecture where serious crimes, deadly...
Difference is a basic fact in life and in our understanding of life, as people are all different as individuals and as social groups and communities. In humanities and social sciences, however, differences are often ignored on the individual level, while emphasized on the collective level. This is particularly true in understanding different cultures. By examining some recent works in East-West cross-cultural studies, the lecturer will argue that we should pay attention to the complexity of difference and what Geoffrey Lloyd calls the “multidimensionality” of things so as to avoid the mistake...
Sometime around the middle of the 9th century, a ship of Indian or Arab-Persian construction went down in the waters off Belitung Island between Sumatra and Borneo. The ship was carrying approximately 60,000 items apparently intended for a destination in the Middle East. Among the objects recovered from the ship were around 45,000 bowls, at least one of which bears an inscription dating it to the year 826 A.D. All of the designs on the bowls are different, but one is of particular interest for devotees of tea, since it carries the inscription cházhǎnzi 茶盞子 (“tea bowl”). A careful linguistic...
We know about the “lost generation” and the central role that Paris played in Anglo-American cultural production; we know much less about the role that Paris occupied in the Japanese imagination. Japanese artists travelled to Paris in the 1920s for the same reasons as others: it was the most exciting city in the world, it was a refuge from a constricting society at home, and it was the city for art. I will compare the imagery produced by painter Fujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) and that of poet and painter Kaneko Mitsuharu (1895-1975), whose Paris years overlap.Fujita was one of the most widely...
The recent global financial crisis has prompted broad and radical rethinking of the place of human values in capitalism. In this lecture, I revisit the expanded visions of humanity presented by Malinowski and Mauss in their respective theories of the gift and consider their implications for the ongoing debate about financial markets and their regulation. Toward this end, I examine a variety of business practices, intellectual ventures and personal dreams inspired by the idea of arbitrage in the career trajectories of a group of Japanese derivatives traders in Tokyo from 1987-2010. My...
In the April 6, 1903 edition of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun, bestselling translator Hara H*itsuan published “Shiiza sansatsu jiken,” his rendition of a sketch by Mark Twain titled “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’.” This minor translation of a minor text by a world-famous American author quickly sparked a knock-down, drag-out fight between Hara and another translator, Yamagata Iso’o. Increasingly incensed by Hara’s failure to grasp Twain’s subtle sense of humor, Yamagata delivered the final, devastating blow in the fight: an annotated retranslation of the same text, published in book form...
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